World's Highest Tax Rates

World's Highest Tax Rates

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has been compiling data on government taxes among OECD countries since 1965. The group's annual report looks at internationally comparative data based on public revenue from *tax contributions as a percentage of gross domestic product for each country, then ranks them based on the highest and lowest overall tax rates.

Here, we take a look at the OECD's 2010 report details. Click ahead to see the world's highest tax rates as a percentage of GDP.

* For the purposes of the OECD's report, “taxes” is confined to compulsory, unrequited payments to general government. Taxes are unrequited in the sense that benefits provided by government to taxpayers are not normally in proportion to their payments. In the OECD classification, taxes are classified by the base of the tax: income and profits, payroll, property, consumption and other taxes. Compulsory social security contributionspaid to general government also are treated as taxes.